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Music Media

Music Meets Steganography 263

Posted by Hemos from the meeting-of-the-minds dept.
austad writes "Wired is running a story about how Aphex Twin has encoded a face into one of his songs. The face is visible when viewing the sound through a spectrograph. This is probably something I wouldn't want to see when coding in a dark room at 3AM. Sorry boys and girls, you have to buy the CD if you want to see it, encoding of the song into a lossy format destroys the image."
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Music Meets Steganography More

Music Meets Steganography

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  • maybe a reason to buy the cd? even if you rip it at 320k/s though? what about burned cd's that'll keep the quality oh yeah, FP!

  • WAV? (Score:1)

    by Mongr ( 238 )
    I predict the widespread trading of wav files on nntp and p2p.

    Nuff Said

  • A way to boost sales... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 11thangel ( 103409 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @07:48PM (#3513458) Homepage
    This is one of the ways musicians can boost sales and get more CD's out: include special features in the encoding. This a) doesnt hurt people who just want the music and/or get screwed over by copy protection, b) doesn't force the consumer to buy anything specific (i.e. hardware, or even the CD in the not-as-legal sense of it) and c) adds something cosmetic, pointless, but nonetheless cool.
    • Conversely, it may just mean an increase in the sharing of the relevant sections of the song [yerbox.org].
    • Yes, except that it sounds like shit when you take a picture and make sound out of it. From the article:

      MetaSynth is a Mac-only application that can take any image and generate sounds from it. The software was widely used in The Matrix to accompany the movie's mind-bending bullet-speed special effects.

      Most musicians who use the application input abstract pictures because they can generate meaningful sounds. Scanned photographs tend to create a kind of discordant, metallic scratching. The program's creator, Eric Wenger, ran pictures of factories through it for some industrial techno compositions.


      So, really, you'd have to dedicate some of the CD to irritating noise, like Aphex Twin must have done.
    • The only way it's boosting sales is by the publicity caused by it. Has the introduction of copy protection led to decreased sales of the CDs by the artist it was first tried on - no - but more people have returned the CDs saying they don't work.

      • Re:A way to boost sales... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Gibbys Box of Trix ( 176568 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2002 @04:13AM (#3515714) Journal
        The article states that the EP was released in 1999, and the face hasn't been announced by James or his record company. That hardly sounds like a publicity stunt to me.

        Aphex Twin isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea, I think you either buy this stuff or not, you're not going to be swayed to buy it because you can see a freaky face when you run it through certain software.

        I would, however, recommend Selected Ambient Works 85-92 [barnesandnoble.com] as a gentler introduction to the man's work.
    • c) adds something cosmetic, pointless, but nonetheless cool.

      Doesn't this describe music in its entirety?
      • Doesn't this describe music in its entirety?

        That would be discounting the innumerable social, political, and cultural aspects of music, which is the entire point of music. Music as a reflection of culture, music as a medium for socio/political commentary... entire volumes could be written on just one aspect of the said uses for music.

        But oh no, music is "cosmetic and pointless." Now this is very true for most pop music these days (which is probably not what you meant), but not music as a whole.

        Granted, Aphex Twin isn't exactly pop music, so the point is moot anyway...
        • I was 90% joking, 10% making a point.

          The point is this: Is it any fairer to dismiss things like fourier stenography as cosmetic and pointless than it is to dismiss the musical portion as such?

          It's obviously not pointless, as we're talking about it apropos of nothing, and when considering aesthetic works, how can anyone portion off aspects as being pointless and others relevant? Artistic works have to be taken by their whole.
    • Yeah, but if you rip to .flac then you don't lose anything, so you could pirate and still see the face. With people using 700MB for a divx movie, sometimes even 1.4Gig, using 250MB for a .flac album is not really very much space...

      graspee

    • Interesting point, but irrelevant, because that part of the slashdot story is completely false. (Surprise, surprise, I know) The image is almost entirely unaffected by compression.
      • According to the Wired story:

        The image doesn't appear in an MP3 file of the song; the compression algorithm destroys the image.

        Not having a CD or an MP3 of the song, I don't know whether that's true or not, but it's hardly slashdot's fault if it's wrong.
    • Yeah.. this is something that few would care about really. An amusement, notyhing more.

      Like.. that old Information Society track that was just one side of a 300bps modem transmission. Most people would skip it, after all, it's not pleasant to listen too.. and a few diehards would rig up a 1:1 transformer (or forgo the transformer) and run this thing through a modem, and see what it actually said.

      • The way I used to show people 300-N-8-1, and the way I viewed the White Roses file was the following:
        1. Take the phone off the hook
        2. go to class
        3. get back
        4. check to see if the phone has stopped beeping, but still has power
        5. hit ATA in telix, as I hit play on the stereo, and hold the phone up to a speaker.
        If you don't own a copy of Peace and Love, Inc. the text file of 300-N-8-1 is included on the data disk [insoc.org] of Don't Be Afraid.
        Or, if you are really really lazy, you can read 300-N-8-1 here [insoc.org].

        INSOC [insoc.org] rocked when it came to hiding cool things on their cds. 300-N-8-1 was cool, White Roses was a blast to complete, and the chili recipe on the CD+G track of Information Society tasted great.
    • Don't mean to nitpick, but I know quite a bit about Richard D. James, and this has nothing to do with sales.

      Actually, if you read the article, you'd note that this is from Windowlicker, released in 1999, and that neither RDJ nor his recording company have made any commotion about this fact.. so clearly publicity had nothing to do with it.

      This guy just loves messing around. He's ridiculously creative, and is trying out new things all the time. Recently in an interview he stated that when he composes, what he does is cause himself to go to sleep for a while, imagine a piece of music while he sleeps, and then wake up and try to recreate it as best he can.

      This may sound dorky or gimmicky, but it's amazing. I mean, if you are imagining the sound in a dream, it is an aural stream of conscience--you are not being inhibited at all by your abilities to use certain equipment, and hence the sound is as close to how you really want it to sound as possible, there being no such physical impediments (yes I just said the same thing multiple times. sorry, getting a point across).

      he's quite a phenomenon. I love him. On his recent CD he has a few tracks of prepared piano--I'm very impressed he broke into that realm. He's also collaborated with philip glass.

      He's a real creative genius.. his output spans many different styles; he is constantly coming up with new and drastically differing ideas...

  • That would... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    scare the living SHIT out of me alone in the oplab at night...
  • I've had this CD since it came out -- you can definitely tell what part of the song contains the image. I tried various visualization programs but couldn't get anything too meaningful.. guess I shouldn't have given up.

  • More resources: (Score:1, Redundant)

    by neksys ( 87486 )
    Find more info about the Aphex face, as well as some software to do same thing yourself
    here [yerbox.org].
    Additionally, more information on it can be found here [tp.spt.fi]

  • no it doesn't (Score:4, Informative)

    by Firlefanz ( 30367 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @07:50PM (#3513476)
    encoding of the song into a lossy format destroys the image."

    I have an mp3 encoded @192kps, using the Nullsoft tiny fullscreen plugin displays the image just fine (its at the last few seconds of the 2nd track of the Windowlicker EP.

    • Re:no it doesn't (Score:3, Informative)

      by CaseyB ( 1105 )
      I can confirm this. I tried it out when I first heard the story a month or two ago. It's not a checksum or some other digitally embedded data block, it's simply the spectrograph output. It doesn't change due to compression, it will just gradually degrade. MP3 quality is way more than adaquate.

      A few of his other songs do similar things, with spirals and other designs appearing in the spectrograph. But the windowlicker track contains a digitized image. Very cool.

    • Yes it does (Score:2, Informative)

      by Asicath ( 522428 )
      There are two images, the first is of Mr. Twin's face at about 5:48 into the song, the second is a swirl at about 6:00. You pry only saw the swirl, reason being it has a lot of blackspace and its very easy to make out swirling kind of noise. The face however, sounds like just regular old garbled Apex Twin noise.
  • I got quite enough of that watching the "Come to Daddy" video, thank you.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Good copy protection (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sean23007 ( 143364 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @07:52PM (#3513491) Homepage Journal
    Interesting way to get people to buy CDs instead of downloading them... how many people would actually download a song of Britney Spears' if pictures of her came with the songs that you buy? Yeah, the RIAA should just try this...

  • aphex twin (Score:5, Informative)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @07:53PM (#3513494) Homepage Journal
    Man, if ever there was a musician who deserves the geek limelight (geeklight?), it is AFX. Not only does he hack his instruments and work primarily (solely?) with homebrewed samples, but he has a fucking tank [aphextwin.nu].

    Also, his music is amazing.

    • Plus - it's about time this guy got some credit.

      I wish I read this thread earlier so I could get some mad karma on all my AFX links. As you can tell by my nickname I'm some sort of fuct up fan of his.

      Oh well - not the end of the world.
      I'm just sick of my submissions getting turned down by slashdot editors and then the article comes up a week later. Bah.
    • I used to work at Chrysalis Music Publishing, Mr James' music publisher (as opposed to record label - at the time Chrysalis signed him he was releasing on lots of different labels under different names.) Anyway the song copyright assignment forms duly arrived when he delivered the first album under the deal - this became "Ambient Works II". he had left every track untitled (as a deliberate policy.) Alas the MCPS (UK equivalent of BMI/ASCAP, they register music copyrights and royalty payments), not unnaturally, had a computer system which required a track to have a NAME before it could be entered onto the system. Cue many interesting calls back and forth between artist, management, Chrysalis, A&R rep, MCPS, PRS et al. IIRC they were eventually registered as "untitled - 01" to "untitled - 22" or somesuch.

      And if you haven't heard any of his stuff, check it out. There's nothing like it. The guy is a genius.

      • That's awesome. While I will be the first to testify to the brilliance of his music, I have to say that no one can title a tune like he can. Obscure computing references, the "nonsense" titles from drukqs (sp?)...

  • Done before (Score:2, Informative)

    by Hatter ( 3985 )
    It's possible to see hidden images in the second Aphex Twin windowlicker track. Take a look here [yerbox.org] for instructions, then visit this site [www.iki.fi] for a quality screenshot.

    • Re:Done before (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Umm

      You do realize that the second Windowlicker track is exactly the track that the Wired article is about.. right?

      What do you mean by "Done before"?

  • inaccuracy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Xmarksta ( 30211 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @07:54PM (#3513498)
    Sorry boys and girls, you have to buy the CD if you want to see it, encoding of the song into a lossy format destroys the image.

    The image is not destroyed -- it just morphs into an image of Jack Valenti.

    • So that's what that demonic picture originally was.

      It wasn't that they were misreading the original picture; it was that they were looking at it through a MP3.

      (BTW, shouldn't you have said Hilary Rosen?)
  • This is news?

    I always see faces when listing to Aphex Twin if I sit there for long enough... although sometimes it helps to be in the right frame of mind.

    :)
  • Sorry boys and girls, you have to buy the CD if you want to see it

    or you could just look at the top of the linked story -- Picture Gallery (3) [wired.com]

    S

  • Shorten! (Score:2, Informative)

    by emkman ( 467368 )
    Shorten, or a .SHN file, is lossless audio compression that works quite well and dominates the bootleg scene, get the neccesary tools here. [etree.org]
  • A vector drawn image of a guitar!

    While in college I rewired my old monitor from an Apple II. I think it was called an Apple III Monitor for some reason. Anyhow, I ran hooked my speaker wires up to the coils that controled the beam in the CRT. This caused it to draw funky patterns. One particular Led Zeppelin track would draw a guitar on the screen.

    Unfortunately the instrument being played was a harmonica. Strange that a harmonica would draw a guitar.

    Nobody would believe me when I told them this, but everyone willing to make a trip up to my room left as a believer.

    I have since written a simple WinAmp plug-in that emulates this effect. The analog way is much more neato though.

  • The face will be seen when the song is shared as a .wav file.

    It is not even needed to share the whole 40 MB.

    If you need to listen to the music, use the mp3 file.
    If you need to see the face, download a 5 sec (mono?) .wav file.

    Or just buy the CD (If you like the music).

  • Humorous (?) Predictions (Score:4, Funny)

    by Wise Dragon ( 71071 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @08:02PM (#3513545) Homepage
    Christian Music will have crosses, doves, and christian fish encoded into the signal, which will probably improve the music.

    Gothic music will encode pentagrams, broken crosses, and tributes to Jack Chick, but nobody will notice because it's all screaming anyway.

    Country music will include images of pickup trucks, cowboy hats, and liquor bottles, but since country fans are all hicks, they will never be discovered.

    The RIAA will mandate that all music have encoded into it pictures that won't survive reencoding, but that, when translated to mp3, will crash your computer.

  • You can download the 9 second wave where the face appears.. here [yerbox.org]

    Also, you can download Spectrogram here [visualizat...ftware.com]

    Not sure of which program in *nix can do it.. any ideas?
  • Yeah!
  • "The image doesn't appear in an MP3 file of the song; the compression algorithm destroys the image"

    this is absolutely not true. ive watched it on my mp3 version, looks exactly the same.
  • another site regarding this was linked on memepool a few weeks ago.

    http://chaos.yerbox.org/face/ [yerbox.org]

    they've got a spectrography program, as well as the .wav that contains the face.
  • Could this be a new means of watermarking audio? The note about mp3 and other lossy compressions distorting/removing the image from the music makes me wonder if this couldn't be used as a form of DRM. It would require a special audio player to enforce it I suppose. Food for thought...or maybe just food.

  • value (Score:2)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    now, this is a great reason to buy the actual CD. I'd pay $15 for that. Then again, I also LIKE Aphex Twins' music. On the other hand, it's not very useful if it's copy-protected and won't play on a PC. I think there's a lesson to be learned here for both the RIAA and the "cartel-protest" crowd.
    • On the other hand, I went to a music store to buy this fine CD the other day, and they didn't have it. In fact, they had nothing at all from Aphex Twin. Guess it's on to Gnutella then. . .
  • Back in the DOS days, I'd stare at the spectrograph in Cubic Player while playing all those neat Purple Motion tunes (I still play them, just in XMMS now)

    I always wondered if it would be possible to do the opposite of a spectrograph.. take an image and convert it to a sound... I guess it is!

  • Old News (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BlaKmaJiK_ ( 101711 )
    I found this about a year and a half ago, oddly enough at about 3 im the morning... scared the hell out of me but was the neatest find. I was watching songs in winamp with the voiceprint plugin that comes with it. Think it would make neat wallpaper.
    I took a screenshot and sent it to my friends and we looked around the web but couldnt find anyone else who had come across this. I think the song was "Complex Mathematical Equation" but i cant remember...
  • That's a good way for some random band to boost their sales: encode moving pictures of a scantily clad pop-star dancing (or in some other way gyrating) into their music. People would have to buy their CD, and as a bonus they get some music. And as a bigger bonus, they get pictures of Britney...
  • Isn't this just asking for another method of circumvention? That is, if it is to be used as some form of copy protection. Someone could encode the images as .mpg and the music as .mp3, and offer them both up for download, and the downloader could combine them at his end if he really wanted to have the image with the sound. Or just keep them separate. Shouldn't be too tough, right?
  • I wonder if Yanni has goatse.cx pictures embedded in his music. Think of the children!

  • AFX is a fine example.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @08:42PM (#3513739) Homepage
    The sad part is that true artists like AFX are pretty much ignored and panned by the lables and the radio stations while crap get's all the airplay.

    Sorry, but AFX has always been much more a musician than the rest of the mot there on pop-radio. Just like Moby,NutralMilk hotel, and the rest of the "underground" they all have more talent in their toenails than every artist that get's big-station radio play.

    And that my friends is exactly why I am proud of my wierd music collection. (I admit..it's wierd... AFX is wierd.. by popular standards...)
    • I agree with your sentiments, have loved afx for a long time now. But don't be too proud of your weird music collection. I have a friend with a huge music collection, and one of the more normal albums he owns is afx. Oh well, people have never really had good taste!
  • Anybody who wants to make their own funkiness on, say Windows, try Coagula [passagen.se].

  • I wrote a tool to hide text in spectrograms (Score:3, Informative)

    by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @08:45PM (#3513753) Homepage Journal

    I once wrote a program to hide printed text in a spectrogram. The first thing I encoded (after test messages such as Hello World) was efdtt from David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers [cmu.edu].

    the program [rose-hulman.edu]

    efdtt [rose-hulman.edu] on top of music from Tet*is Advance

    • wow. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jon_c ( 100593 )
      That is very cool, i'm impressed. The output looks like something an old dot matrix would have made. Am i right in looking at it that the text is made up like that, where each 'row' is a sin wave at some frequency?

      -Jon

  • There's a hilarious fictional IRC session [spaz.com] featuring Richard James as the egomanical moderator. I reckon I'm not getting even half of the jokes but it's still a riot.

  • Could it be Jesus' face????
  • aphex twin/RDJ is quite the geek, making his own synths and coding some of his own software for use in his music....it's one of the reasons it takes him ages to get a fucking album out, apparently. there was a recent interview where he said he'd lost an mp3 player that was loaded with tons of his songs (and i think squarepusher demos too -- aphex and pusher are friends,) like two albums' worth of unreleased material he was sorting through....just left the player on a plane and that his paranoia over getting the songs released on the 'net was one impetus for releasing his latest album, druqks. more proof that mp3s have changed artists' modus operandi, even if it's not all artists.

  • It's not steganography (Score:4, Informative)

    by rhizome ( 115711 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @10:59PM (#3514499) Homepage Journal
    Steganography is encoding something in another medium so as not to alter the carrier medium, like a watermark. What Aphex Twin did was to use a piece of software that converts graphics to sound (x, y, z = time, frequency, and intensity/volume) via an Inverse Fast-Fourier Transform. There is no encoding involved, the picture *is* the sound that you hear. Big difference.
    • Sorry, you're not quite correct. Steganography is only the process of hiding data. A good example from Simon Singh's The Code Book is stone tablets encased in wax. The data (whatever is written on the stone tablets) is there, merely hidden by the thick layer of wax. Both digital watermarking and Aphex Twin's method are valid steganography. The term is generally used nowadas in reference to the former, but that does not make that its meaning.
  • I wrote a quick app that allows embedding of an image in a similar way, and have verified that neither encoding to mp3 nor encoding to ogg destroys the image. I don't know where Wired got the idea, but they're wrong.
    If you think about it, it makes perfect sense too: changing the frequency components of the sound so radically that the image is no longer visible would mean that the music sounds totally different too. mp3 and ogg are lossy, but they're not THAT destructive.
    • That depends on the acoustic model,the encoding scheme and where in the signal the image is hidden. For example one could encode the image entirely in frequencies higher than those audible to humans. Some encoding schemes would certainly strip that information pretty early on.
  • Some points - as others have mentioned, mp3 encoding does not get rid of the face - it is still spooky.

    And one of the standard visualisation effects on the empeg [empeg.com] shows it beautifully.

    What's even weirder is it doesn't sound too nasty, musically. Every time I've tried to draw pics in the waveform it's sounded harsh and metallic.
  • Yawn, this AFX face thing is old news. I heard about it months ago and it's been fairly common knowledge among AFX fans for awhile now. Oh, well.

    However, I've been looking for other songs with odd spectrographs. The most recent contender has been the track "A is to B as B is to C" on geogaddi, the most recent Boards of Canada LP. Nothing as obvious as a face, but it has some strange effects, plus something apparently hidden in the high frequencies (at around 15000Hz, if I remember correctly). Anyone have any idea what this is? (You can view an image of the spectrograph here [harvard.edu]).

  • Cool ? yes and is available for macs here [uisoftware.com]
  • This item has been known for a couple years now. And contrary to the article, you don't have to have the CD.

    I rip all my CD's to MP3 and it works fine. In fact, I've never actually played the CD.

    Also, Chaos Machine didn't discover it, but hey, gotta try and get fame somehow!

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